Pictorial Photographers of America

Pictorial Photographers of America was an influential American photography organization founded in 1916. It emerged in the wake of the Photo-Secession and helped champion pictorial photography as a creative art form, encouraging exhibitions, publications, and wider public appreciation for photographic prints.

As a publishing body, the group is best known for works such as Pictorial Photography in America, including the 1921 annual issued in New York. That volume credits the organization as author and lists an editorial board that included Clarence H. White, Henry Hoyt Moore, Dwight A. Davis, and John Paul Edwards.

Because this is a corporate author rather than an individual person, there is no single personal life story behind the name. Readers will get the most from these books by seeing them as curated snapshots of an artistic community: albums of images, ideas, and standards from a period when photographers were working hard to establish photography as an art.